The present invention relates generally to the nomenclature of organic chemical compounds and their structures. More specifically, the invention relates to a novel process and system for naming chemical compounds, which allows linear notation of chemical structure in an extremely simple way. Hereinafter, the system of the chemical nomenclature according to the present invention will be called "Radial Nomenclature".
This invention is a discovery of a consistent rule that applies to all organic compounds for the linear notation of chemical structures. The invention incorporates specific methods suitable for visual and aural information exchange between humans as well as specific methods for information processing by computers, and is a linear notation of chemical structures using natural language that is extremely simple, being composed of approximately a hundred basic terms and a systematic grammar. The inventor names this notation "Radial Nomenclature", which expresses the characteristics of this notation.
It is now 200 years since the molecular structure of organic compounds began to be researched, but as organic compounds since then have been independently named without a unifying logic, there has been confusion in science and industry.
In order to resolve this problem, a movement began to establish means based on molecular structures, and in AD 1892, the first international proposal (the so-called "Geneva Rules") was made. However, as this proposal could be applied only to a portion of organic compounds, this was revised and extended by the Commission for the Reform of Nomenclature in Organic Chemistry of the International Union of Chemistry (I.U.C.), and this work was succeeded by the Commission of Nomenclature of Organic Chemistry of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (I.U.P.A.C.).
This commission continues its work to complete the establishment of a set of IUPAC NOMENCLATURE RULES, but as compounds of new types appear, the rules are revised and supplemented in extensive detail, so that a consistency in the rules is becoming scarce, and the corpus has become a rule book of over several hundred basic terms and over 300 pages. As a result, this nomenclature has become a useful tool for nomenclature specialists, but a grammatically difficult "Basque tongue" for students new to chemistry.
On the one hand, information on over 6 million organic compounds are now extensively used in chemical industry and research, but notwithstanding the development of computers as tools for information processing, as there is no consistent nomenclature, serial numbers that are unrelated to chemical structures are used in order to relate chemical structures to compound names in computer processing.
On the other hand, we have the Wiswesser Line-Formula Chemical Notation (usually abbreviated as WLN) and Nodal Nomenclature (Noel Lozach, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 18, 887-899 (1979); 23, 33-46 (1984)) which are linear notations or nomenclature of chemical structures that are logically consistent.
In terms of the unequivocal correspondence between notations or names and chemical structures, the former is said to be good, and it is assumed that the latter also corresponds.
WLN is a predominantly character-and-symbol based linear notation that is suitable for information processing using computers, but as it is not in natural language, it lacks straightforwardness for human senses.
The reason that the latter Nodal Nomenclature was assumed to have unequivocal correspondence between names and structures is that in that system, the smallest component of the skeletal structures of compounds as identified as the atom, and their mutual relationship is notated linearly, so that it has similarities to this invention, but its applicability to all compounds has still not been demonstrated.